The students' academic performance at the Conservatory of Music: a structural model from the motivational variables

Abstract

The aim of this research is to analyze the relationships between several motivational variables in the teaching Music context during the Professional Grade of Music at the Conservatory. More specifically, it is tried to analyze the relationships between the students’ self-concept, their causal attributions, their academic goals and their content goals, and the relationships between all of them and the academic performance, in that context. The participants are 209 Conservatory students, males and women, who learn to play a wide range of musical instruments, with an average age of 17.25 years old. All of them answer four closed-ended questionnaires: the AF-5 Questionnaire (Musitu & García, 1999), the Goal Questionnaire (Wentzel, 1989), the Multidimensional Causal Attributions Evaluation Scale (Barca, 2000) and the Academic Goal Questionnaire (Hayamizu & Weiner, 1991). In general, the causal diagram’s results show adequate fit indices and corroborate the relations between the variables which were set out from the theoretical framework. However, it is observed a curious positive relation between the poor performance-low capacity attribution and the academic self-concept.

El objetivo de esta investigación es valorar las relaciones que diversas variables motivacionales mantienen entre sí, en el contexto de las enseñanzas musicales en el Grado Profesional de Conservatorio de Música. Más concretamente, se pretendió analizar las relaciones entre autoconcepto, atribuciones causales, metas académicas y metas en general de los estudiantes, y las relaciones de todas ellas con el rendimiento académico, en dicho contexto. Participaron 209 estudiantes, mujeres y hombres, del Conservatorio que tocaban diferentes instrumentos musicales, con una edad media de 17.25 años. Se usaron el cuestionario AF-5 (Musitu y García, 1999), el Cuestionario de Metas (Wentzel, 1989), la Escala de Atribuciones Causales Multidimensionales (Barca, 2000) y el Cuestionario de Metas Académicas (Hayamizu y Weiner, 1991). El modelo estructural sometido a prueba muestra adecuados índices de ajuste y corrobora las relaciones planteadas entre las variables consideradas a partir del estudio teórico del tema.